2016

Blogging remains slow, primarily because I have been without a computer for almost two months (!), and in the circumstances I am very happy when a blog entry that more or less writes itself comes along. The Canadian Federal Court of Appeal’s recent decision, per Stratas J.A., in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bri-Chem Supply Ltd., 2016 FCA 257 […] Read more

It is now taken as a given in most legal and political circles that the vaunted “Great Repeal Bill” will contain a great Henry VIII clause. The purpose of this post is to speculate on how the clause might be crafted to to overcome the many constitutional problems created by Brexit and to assist Britain […] Read more

There is nothing especially new about R (Public Law Project) v. Lord Chancellor [2016] UKSC 39, but it does contain a useful review of the basics of judicial review of secondary legislation. The Lord Chancellor had sought to introduce by way of secondary legislation a residence test for eligibility for legal aid. Entitlement to legal aid is determined […] Read more

Readers may be interested in the following call for papers, issued by my Cambridge colleagues Peter Cane and Hayley Hooper and UCL’s Jeff King: We invite applications to participate in the 2017 WG Hart Legal Workshop at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, on 10-11 July, 2017. The main aim of the Workshop is […] Read more

An interesting aspect of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in Canada (Attorney General) v. Igloo Vikski Inc., 2016 SCC 38 is the application of reasonableness review. The question was whether certain items of hockey equipment used by goalkeepers are a “glove, mitten or mitt” or an “article of plastics”, an important question because different tariffs […] Read more

Earlier this summer, the British Labour Party ended up in court over an attempt to restrict the electorate for a leadership contest (won, last weekend, by Jeremy Corbyn). At issue in Evangelou and others v. McNichol, [2016] EWCA Civ 816 was whether the Party’s National Executive Committee could provide that only those who had been members of the […] Read more

I have been in the United Kingdom for almost a month now. Brexit, unsurprisingly, dominates the political landscape and I expect I will be returning to it more than once in the coming months and years. This is just a brief post to highlight the scale of the challenges for the United Kingdom of implementing Brexit, […] Read more

Paul Craig’s essay on Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (discussed previously here) is an excellent survey of the historical foundations of English administrative law, which casts serious doubt on Hamburger’s account. Entitled “The Legitimacy of US Administrative Law and the Foundations of English Administrative Law: Setting the Historical Record Straight“, it is available on SSRN: Administrative […] Read more

Although I have not been blogging much for various reasons (hampered most recently by the sad demise of my HP Probook), I have been writing. My new paper on the distinctiveness of the Crown in judicial review of administrative action will be published in the Review of Constitutional Studies shortly. Here is the abstract for “Royal Treatment: […] Read more

In the concluding chapters of Public Law Adjudication in Common Law Systems: Process and Substance — the edited collection arising from the first Public Law Conference, held at the University of Cambridge in 2014 — both Professor David Feldman and Professor Cheryl Saunders gently suggested that my chapter, “Administrative Law: A Values-Based Approach“, was produced from a Canadian perspective. […] Read more